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MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) the Technique of Morris Louis [This MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) The Technique of Morris Louis [This text is reproduced in its entirety from the following publication: Upright, Diane. Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985, p. 49-58.] HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ACRYLIC PAINTS The widespread use of acrylic paints by contemporary artists tends to obscure the fact that it was not until several decades after their development that this synthetic medium gained currency. For one thing, their initial availability was limited. Of more consequence, however, was the resistance of artists to adapting their techniques to the new medium, whose designation “synthetic” or “plastic” seemed anathema to their conceptions of fine art.i The development of acrylic resin paints dates to the beginning of the century, when German and Mexican scientists working independently discovered the first synthetic plastics. Combining carbolic acid with formaldehyde yielded a soft, gummy substance that could be molded and set by heat. The first patent for commercial production was obtained in 1915 by Dr. Otto Rohm of Darmstadt, Germany; production began in the United States in the 1930s. The Mexican mural painters David Siqueiros and José Gutierrez obtained the cooperation of the Union Carbide laboratories in 1934 to develop a medium suitable for outdoor mural paintings. Siqueiros had published a manifesto in 1930 expressing his conviction that art must exist outside the museum setting and become part of the environment so as to reach the widest public possible. This idea was the motivation for his mural projects in Mexico and the United States, as well as for the experimental workshop he organized in New York in 1936. Jackson Pollock was the workshop’s most famous American participant, but Morris Louis also worked there. Its products included murals and floats and banners for Communist demonstrations. Equally important were the experiments with spray guns, airbrushes, and synthetic paints, including Duco. As Francis O’Connor reports, “The spontaneous application of paint and the problems of ‘controlled accidents’ occupied the members of the workshop.”ii By the early 1940s, two American paint manufacturers, Leonard Bocour and Harry Levison, were working independently to perfect an acrylic paint suited to artists’ needs. In November 1941 an artist friend brought Bocour a “jar of liquid that looked very much like honey, thick and viscous.”iii Bocour mixed white pigment into this acrylic resin and produced a paint that adhered well to both illustration board and paper, dried quickly, and left no halo like that formed when turpentine or mineral spirits were used to dilute pigment. Further experiments MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) yielded the stabilizer best suited to hold pigment and resin in suspension. In 1946 Bocour’s acrylic resin paint, Magna, first appeared on the market. Bocour began giving artists tubes of the new paint to test its potential. Among the first experimenters were Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, and, beginning in 1947, Morris Louis. Bocour’s first formula for Magna produced a thin, soupy paint. He later added another acrylic resin to produce a thicker consistency, more closely resembling that of the oil paint that artists were accustomed to using. Louis’s letters to Bocour in 1958 complain of difficulties in thinning the “recent beeswax stuff.”iv His complaints continued until April 1960, when Bocour produced a special Magna formula for Louis and Kenneth Noland. He obtained a consistency like that of maple syrup by eliminating the suspending agent. This paint was far more amenable to thinning, making it readily adaptable to the techniques then used by the two painters. American painting of the 1960s, the first decade in which acrylic paints became the favored medium of artists, if often termed “color painting” because of the greatly increased brilliance of the colors attainable with synthetic paints. As one writer explained, “The transparency of the resin gives . a quality of light reflection and refraction with the paints that provides a luminosity and a sense of depth unattainable in any other medium. The colors seem to glow from within.”v In fact, the acrylic resin Acryloid F-10, used as the medium for Magna, has a transparency clearer than all but the highest grade of optical glass. When used on unprimed canvas, Louis’s practice in the majority of his paintings, Magna penetrates the fabric and completely covers the fibers, thus further increasing the colors’ luminosity.vi (Figs. 4, 5, and 6, which show the backs of Dalet Aleph (cat. no. 137), Yad (cat. no. 140), and Hot Half (cat. no. 653), demonstrate how thoroughly the paint soaks through unprimed canvas.) Magna was the only acrylic paint Louis ever used and, from 1954, the only medium he used. Magna contains pigment, Acryloid F-10, and small amounts of bodying and stabilizing agents. It can be thinned with turpentine, which creates a matte surface, or with additional medium, which creates a glossy surface and retards the drying time. Each layer of paint bonds chemically with the underlying layers, forming a homogeneous surface regardless of the varying thicknesses of paint layers. When applied to unprimed canvas, Magna seals and protects the fabric fibers. One difficulty with the paint is its tendency to pick up underlying layers, especially if a great deal of turpentine or medium is used to thin the pigment. Varnishes have been developed that can be applied between coats of paint to eliminate this problem. MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) LOUIS’S TECHNIQUES Early Paintings, 1934–53 Prior to 1953, Louis worked on a small easel scale, rarely more than 36 by 30 inches, using primed linen canvas. He worked with oil paint until Magna became available to him in 1947. Initially, he simply applied Magna on the primed linen, working with it as he had previously worked with oils. The first evidence of less traditional techniques appears in four paintings from 1948–49 (cat. nos. 18–21), in which Louis evidently “drew” by squeezing lines of paint directly from the tube onto the canvas, in a manner reminiscent of Miró. This technique prepared Louis for working with dripped lines of paint, which he began in 1950 with The Ladder (cat. no. 27) and developed most fully in his Charred Journal series of 1951 (cat. nos. 30–36). Obviously influenced by Jackson Pollock, Louis continued to explore drawing with dripped paint in 1952 (cat. nos. 37–39). In 1953 Louis produced a group of paintings (cat. nos. 44–47) that reveal his response to Willem de Kooning and his continuing interest in Pollock. Still using primed linen, Louis expanded the size of his canvases to about 6 1/2 by 8 feet. He used Magna and also explored the effects of aluminum paint, whose surface reflections and resulting spatial ambiguities had also interested Pollock. Drips and splatters are combined with brushed areas whose vigorous activity and spatial compression relate to De Kooning’s figure paintings of this period, a group of which were shown in 1953 at the Washington Workshop, where Louis taught and exhibited. One can only speculate about which of Louis’s paintings from 1953 were made after he and Noland visited Helen Frankenthaler’s New York studio in April of that year. The gestural drawing and figurative overtones of Trellis (cat. no. 48) have much in common with her contemporary paintings, although she had given up the use of primed canvas that Louis still relied on for this painting. Even bolder in their experimental qualities are three paintings, Dark Thrust (cat. no. 49), Landscape (Mid-day) (cat. no. 50), and Untitled (#13 Experiment) (cat. no. 51), that more directly reflect Frankenthaler’s innovative techniques. Landscape (Mid-day), signed and dated 1953, was painted in two layers. The first was made by pouring diluted black and ocher paint from what is now the left side horizontally across the surface, creating a stained background. Then Louis vigorously brushed thick Magna over this field. The result resembles a Franz Kline painting superimposed upon a mid-1950s Frankenthaler—directly reflecting Louis’s interest in two of the artists whose paintings he had seen during his trip to New York. Finally, although Louis’s canvas measures just 45 by 35 MORRIS LOUIS (1912-1962) inches, it was cut from a larger painted canvas and stretched only after being cropped. This practice, new for Louis, had already been adopted by Pollock and Frankenthaler. The expansive quality of Louis’s composition, which appears to continue beyond the frame in all directions, was not a feature of Pollock’s work, nor of Frankenthaler’s until the early 1960s. Dark Thrust is very similar to Landscape (Mid-day) in its techniques and size, but Untitled (#13 Experiment) displays only the black and ocher staining on a canvas slightly more than six feet high. The designation “Experiment” inscribed on the stretcher recalls Noland’s explanation that he and Louis worked in the same studio together after the New York visit, attempting to break down their previous assumptions about painting. This canvas introduces the ideas Louis explored more thoroughly in the series of Veil paintings from 1954. Veil Paintings, 1954 The nature of Louis’s achievement in his series of Veil paintings from 1954 was aptly described by Clement Greenberg: The crucial revelation he got from Pollock and Frankenthaler had to do with facture as much as anything else. The more closely color could be identified with its ground, the freer would it be from the interference of tactile associations; the way to achieve this closer identification was by adapting water-color technique to oil and using thin paint on an absorbent surface. Louis spills his paint on unsized and unprimed cotton duck canvas, leaving the pigment almost everywhere thin enough, no matter how many different veils of it are superimposed, for the eye to sense the threadedness and wovenness of the fabric underneath.
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